The history of the Italian gods is completely lost. For all that
the early Roman literature tells us of their origin, they may have
been either self-created or eternal. Rome was a seedling shaken
from some old perished civilisation. The Romans created their own
empire, but they inherited their gods. They supply no example of
an Aryan nation evolving its own mythology and religion. Regal
Rome, as we know from Niebuhr, was not the root from which our
Rome sprang, but an old imperial city, from whose ashes sprang
that Rome we all know so well. The mythology of the Latin writers
came to them full-grown.
The gods of Greece were a creation of the Greek mind, indeed; but
of their ancestry, i.e., of their development from more ancient
divine tribes, we know little. Like Pallas, they all but start into
existence suddenly full-grown. Between the huge physical entities
of the Greek theogonists and the Olympian gods, there intervenes
but a single generation. For this loss of the Grecian mythology,
and this substitution of Nox and Chaos for the remote ancestors of
the Olympians, we have to thank the early Greek philosophers, and
the general diffusion of a rude scientific knowledge, imparting a
physical complexion to the mythological memory of the Greeks.
In the theogony of the ancient inhabitants of this country, we have
an example of a slowly-growing, slowly-changing mythology, such as
no other nation in the world can supply. The ancestry of the Irish
gods is not bounded by a single generation or by twenty.
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